Purchased A New Domain (And Lost Gobs of WordPress Referrals)

i just updated my url (bought a domain) and my wordpress referrels have plummeted. i used to have depressiontimeblog.wordpress.com. thought i was improving my SEO when i changed primary to http://depression-time.com/. went from receiving like 30, 40, 50 wordpress referrels a day to 5, 10, 15.
could traffic drop be related to url change? (blog still shows in wordpress feeds and old forwards to the new.)
if so, is there some way to repair it?

Unfortunately, no. I know exactly what you're going through, because I was the first person on Wp.com to get a custom domain, and when I saw the change in hits I was outraged. Wait it out, though; within 4 months it'll come back, as search engines figure out what happened; right now, they're mistaking you for a whole new blog with no pagerank.

To facilitate the process, get some incoming links to your new URL. The more and the faster you can get them, the better.

What happens is, the search engines think whatever.com is brand new. it has zero pagerank. The old site has the same pagerank technically, but all of a sudden it has no incoming links at all...so it starts to fall off a cliff.

yeah. guess it's across the board, but it's most obvious in wordpress referrals as that's where most of my traffic used to come from. by this time today normally i'd have 20-30 wordpress referrals. i have 4 right now. thanks, raincoaster, auxclass. hopefully i get my traction back soon.